Category: mad men

Tube Review: Mad Men and True Blood



Mad Men – S04E01 – “Public Relations”

Mad Men is back and in a big way. It’s been almost a year since Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce was started thanks to Don’s midnight revolt against the British conglomerate. Since the, the agency has gotten some buzz around its challenging ad campaigns and relocated to offices in the Time-Life Building. Joan Holloway is not the queen bee, with her own office from which she runs the machine. Harry Crane is now a seasoned salesman to television companies, just returning from a trip to L.A. around Thanksgiving. Pete Campbell seems to have discarded his conniving ways and treats Don and his coworkers with respect. Peggy is one of the most drastic changes, appearing to be Head of Creative, with at least one male employee under her whom she makes no bones about showing she is in charge of.

Don is giving an interview to Ad Age magazine in the opening in which he is asked “Who is Don Draper?”, a question that works as the theme of the entire series. Don’s reply is defensive and awkward, and after the article comes out the picture of the agency’s figurehead causes them to lose the Jai Alai account, leaving Phillip Morris as 71% of their accounts. As Don deals with his partners irritation over this he is also handling the rather bitter aftermath of his divorce with Betty. Betty and the kids are still living in the old house, now with her new husband Henry. Don’s lawyer advises him to pressure Betty to finally find a new place and he does at the end of the episode. It’s pretty apparent Betty wants her “pound of flesh” for putting up with Don’s philandering and concealment of his true identity. She’s also the dominate one in her new marriage and is incredibly harsh on the now pre-teen Sally.

All in all, I felt things don’t bode well for Don Draper. There is a freshness and life in the new agency, but Don’s Manhattan apartment is a dark and cold den. He’s unable to bed what ever woman he wants anymore, and ends up calling over a prostitute who knows him well. In bed he shows an affinity for rough play, something we haven’t seen this full blown in the character before. In the end, his interview with a different reporter feels partially forced. Roger Sterling in particular really beat Don for fumbling the spot with Ad Age. We end with Don forcing a smile and telling a story that frames Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce as a rebellious company that is willing to let a client leave, rather than compromise their fresh and edgy ideas.




True Blood – S03E06 – “I Got A Right To Sing The Blues”

This season of True Blood has been the one that really clicked with me. I think its because a lot of what is happening is pay off from the set up of the previous two season, in particular the conflict between the vampire kingdoms of Louisiana and Mississippi. At the end of the last episode, Russell Edgington, the vampire of king of Mississippi, seemed delighted to discovery Sookie’s powers. This episode though, he doesn’t really know what she is or what they are, only that its a great source of power. Bill’s cover is finally blown and his creator, Marlena is tasked with draining his blood resulting in complete death. Eric, discovering that Russell was the man who killed his father centuries ago, is playing like he has complete allegiance to the man until he gets a chance to kill him. On the subplot side, Tara finds a way to escape Franklin and apparently bashes his brains out, Jessica feeds on a patron at Merlotte’s, Jason learns the girl who he was developing feelings for is engaged, and Sam learns his brother has been forced into using his shifting to participate in dogfights.

It can’t be said that there aren’t enough plot threads this season. I personally enjoy how packed every episode is, in comparison to last season which felt like it drug by painfully slowly. Now every episode seems to give a a lot of information and move along at a brisk pace. The cast has definitely grown and even characters that used to grate on me (I’m looking at you Tara) are actually enjoyable now. I am hoping that she didn’t kill Franklin though, as he has been the new addition to the series that I have enjoyed the most. His schizophrenic personality added some interesting dark humor to the show. I also have really liked the werewolves portrayal as trailer trash, juxtaposed against the vampires as Southern aristocracy.

The plots that aren’t keep me interested are Jason’s pursuit to become a cop and Sam’s trashy family. The Jason/Andy side plot has a lot of potential but it seems to be going aimless now and is simply filler. I hope that it gets tied into one of the larger main plots in a cleverly unexpected way. I’m think Lafayette’s local V dealing could lead he and Jason into an intersection. Sam’s family’s story seems like it could be wrapped up next week. He arrives at the dogfight ring and rescues his brother, telling his parents he never wants to seem them again. Unless there is a really interesting twist added to that story its going feel like they are stretching it out for as long as they can. Despite these weak spots, the season has been great fun so far. We just hit the halfway point and I am excited to see where the characters end up because it seems like a big shake up is about to happen in the vampire community.

Tube Time: Mad Men Primer

It’s the eve of the Mad Men Season 4 premiere and fans of the show are definitely curious to find out what has happened to Don Draper and crew since last we saw them. If you’ve never seen the show (and are one of those people who starts watching a few season in, shame on you!) or are fan and just want to geek out with me, here’s a concise guide to everything you need to know about Mad Men.

Don Draper (Jon Hamm) – Don is the core character of the series. A charismatic, suave, yet incredibly cold figure. Draper is a mystery to his co-workers and even his family. He’s a man without friends, he makes acquaintances. His place of business in season one is Sterling-Cooper, a successful advertising agency in the heart of Manhattan. It’s here that Draper is the creative director, wrangling a group of frat boys into producing print ad campaigns for clients like Phillip-Morris, Kodak, and Goodyear, among others. At home, Draper does the minimal duties of a husband and doesn’t seem to have any sort of connection with his children. He often sneaks away to visit which ever mistress he has at the time, women who all seem to be the kind of female he prevents his wife from becoming. In season one, we learn that Draper’s real name is Dick Whitman, and that he served along the real Don Draper in the Korean War. Draper is killed as a result of Whitman’s error, and seeing a chance to shake off the life he hated, Draper takes the dead man’s dog tags. In season two, Draper goes to California for a business trip and ends up MIA, lost in a malaise of empty sex and booze with a young girl and her bohemian family, eventually reconciling with the real Draper’s widow. Season three was a major turning point, with all of his secrets coming out and his wife beginning an affair with another man as a result. By the end of that most recent season, Draper is on his way to a divorce and has broken off from Sterling Cooper to form a new upstart agency.

Betty Draper (January Jones) – Don’s wife, Betty, is an incredibly polarizing figure. You either love her, hate her, or see saw violently back and forth between the two. Betty was born into a fairly well to do family in Philadelphia. She ended up working as a model in Italy as a teen which is where she met Don. They moved to Long Island, had two kids and Betty did what every wife was expected to do at the time; be a stay at home mom. Shortly before the start of Season One, Betty’s mother dies and, much to her chagrin, her father begins dating another woman. Betty also seems to have a real issue with the mundanity of suburban life, and convinces to Don to let her see a psychiatrist. She is unaware that Don makes calls in the evenings after every one of her sessions, where the psych reads off his notes from the session. She is also unaware, but suspicious of, the philandering her husband is up to. In season two, Betty begins to transform, becoming fully aware that Don has slept with at least on other woman. They end up growing distant, until Betty’s father suffers a stroke. They both travel to Pennsylvania to see him and his growing senility frightens Betty. At the end of the second season, Betty learns she is pregnant and has sex with a stranger in the backroom of a bar. In the third season, the marriage is strained even further starting with Betty meeting Henry Francis, an advisor to Governor Rockefeller. She gives birth and also has to deal with her father coming to live with them. The family’s housekeeper ends up saddled with the responsibilities as Betty seems to reject all of it. She and Henry meet in secret, and she breaks into Don’s locked desk where she learns about his life as Dick Whitman. Using fraud as grounds, she files for divorce, and season three ends up with Betty on her way to marry Henry.

Peggy Olsen (Elizabeth Moss) – The opening of season one was Peggy’s first day in the typing pool of Sterling Cooper. She ends up as Don Draper’s secretary and she seems to be the first woman he doesn’t want to bed, not out of a lack of attraction, but from an unspoken respect they have between each other. Peggy grew up Brooklyn, raised in a strict Catholic family. She visits her mother frequently, but is straying away from the traditional upbringing. In her first year at Sterling Cooper, Betty ends up sleeping with sleazy accounts man Pete Campbell, is impregnated by him, and secretly gives the child up for adoption. We learn in season two, that Don was the only person at work she let know about this, and much like his own secrets, he guards it with the utmost privacy. Betty also gets promoted to writing copy after giving some surprising feedback during a focus testing of lipstick. In season two, Peggy continues her move towards independence when she begins spending time with a her mother’s parish priest. The priest urges Peggy to go to confession to relieve any guilts she might have but Peggy realizes she doesn’t need him to do that. In confrontation with Pete, Peggy reveals the existence of her child, something that hits him hard as his newlywed wife Trudy has just learned she is infertile. In season three, Peggy leaves Brooklyn for an apartment in Manhattan and realizes her ideas in Don’s daily meetings are being ignored by the boys’ club. She takes a certain satisfaction when one idea for Pepsi’s new diet soda, which she felt was dumb, gets shot down during the presentation. Peggy also begins an affair with a much older former employee of Sterling Cooper and she is brought in Don’s new ad agency when he leaves the company.

Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce – This is the new agency founded by Don and company. In season two Sterling Cooper is taken over by a British corporation, and over the course of season three the employees find themselves increasingly on the chopping block. As a final revolt, Don organizes a raid of the office accounts films in the middle of the night and steals away some of the top money making contracts. He also brings some of his fellow employees he respects the most. These include: Roger Sterling and Bert Cooper (his former bosses, now partners), Lane Pryce (a British executive who is tired of being a whipping boy), Peggy Olsen, Harry Crane (Sterling Cooper’s former television creative director), Pete Campbell (often a nemesis for Don), and Joan Holloway (the head secretary and the one who made the machine run at Sterling Cooper). Together they appear to be set up to unleash new dynamic advertising campaigns and provide a great antagonist for their former company.

The Boys at Sterling Cooper – Left behind are two figures: Ken Cosgrove and Paul Kinsey. Cosgrove started out as a dopey accounts man who would forever frustrate Kinsey. Kinsey was an aspiring writer, inspired by the Beats, who grew irate when Cosgrove got a story printed in The Atlantic Monthly. What made it even worse was that the story was good. In season three, Cosgrove began to shine was promoted to Senior Vice President of Accounts, over Pete Campbell who became another enemy of Cosgrove’s. When Draper’s revolt took place, they grabbed Campbell over Cosgrove. Paul Kinsey worked closely with Peggy, writing copy in season three. He ends up despising her, but the two get wasted together during a late night session. It’s still remains to be seen how Kinsey will react when he learns he was left behind.

So get yourselves ready as we find out what they’ve all been up since last season. As per usual a few months to a year will have passed, so I think that puts us at the start of 1965. Tune in tomorrow night, AMC at 10/9c.